[ SECRET POST #2050 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2050 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________



16.


__________________________________________________



17.


__________________________________________________



18.


__________________________________________________



19.


__________________________________________________



20.


__________________________________________________



21.


__________________________________________________




22.


__________________________________________________







Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 114 secrets from Secret Submission Post #293.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm an English major and the ubiquity of the snobbishness you describe drives me insane. :| It's the same with screenwriting -- all of my professors scoff at television, for example, as on a level below the artistic merit of dog turds. And like yeah okay, a lot of SF&F is crap, a lot of YA lit is crap, a lot of TV is crap, a lot of pop culture in general is crap. But a lot of literary fiction is crap that's also boring because it's all about shallow boring characters drifting through endless iterations of the same domestic squabbles. To me, at least YA lit and TV shows have characters that I fall passionately in love with and plots that excite me.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, it's absolutely infuriating. I'm an English major too, and at my old University I was a Creative Writing major. I WENT TO UNIVERSITY TO WRITE IN THESE GENRES I LOVE WHY ARE YOU COCKBLOCKING MY DREAMS?! >E

It's a completely unfounded prejudice, and every student I've talked to agrees with me. But we're not the ones in charge, and so we either have to just suck it up and deal or try and fight far harder than we should have to in order to gain ANY ground. Sucks. :(

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. :< I feel creatively constrained; my ideas flow best in a genre that I can't write if I want to get good grades!

[(Anonymous)]

I know EXACTLY what you mean. :/

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT
I'm fascinated by this, and a little part of me wonders, hopefully in a non-prejudiced way, whether the posters talking about this kind of problem attended younger universities and colleges than I did. It seems like the kind of ill thought-out thing somebody would say if they had a bee in their bonnet about proving that their department was Worthy and Academic.

I heard loads of the lecturers at my university bitching out things like LOTR (often with fair points to make). I also got lent ten volumes of 'Dykes To Watch Out For' by one of them, and another collected 'The Walking Dead' and had a self-annotated FFVII strategy guide in his office. ("Yeah, the original stuff is good, but it's riddled with errors. Mine's a lot more complete.") Whatever their personal likes and dislikes, my university supported me through my undergraduate dissertation: "'Oscar Is A Lady?' In Which We Discover That The HERO Is FEMALE," which was a rather excitable comparison piece between the manga 'The Rose of Versailles' and the formerly banned lesbian novel of the 1920s, 'The Well of Loneliness.' For my MA dissertation, I wrote a fairly involved essay about the importance of souls and metaphorical and literal re-incarnation in 'Cloud Atlas.' I called it "Streetmap to Nirvana: Mapping the Souls of Cloud Atlas." And neither that one nor the one about Berubara were the most unusual choices that got made on my course. I remember one girl was studying manuscripts at the National Library of Wales, and got permission to write hers about the way that documents bound together used to be read as a single text, and the way that one she was examining, containing biblical pieces alongside parish records, had a self-informing intertextuality. And one of the guys in that group, last time I spoke to him - he was planning a piece about textual spaces, and was strongly considering comparing audience-participatory plays of the Renaissance with dedicated servers on WoW. I don't know if that's the exact line of thinking he followed in the end, but the department was completely behind him. They all had their own interests, but they didn't let that get in the way of ours, and that was a great, professional approach as far as I'm concerned.

They barely even suggested that I justify why an aging shoujo manga was a good topic to write on. :'D I pretty much just said "this is manga, just so's you know, and I'm not going to justify styudying it, because this entire dissertation will do that for you."

[tabaqui]

All of this sounds so damn interesting. :)

[(Anonymous)]

ugh, i wrote about my similar experience in a creative writing class downthread

i know your pain! professors are *advisors* and should not have so much creative influence over their students

[(Anonymous)]

At my old grad school, I had a friend who was majoring in English/Creative Writing (folklore for me), and she told me one day that, because she writes mainly fantasy and science fiction, the other English profs had to basically go behind the back of the prof who was considered the main CW prof to accept her into the program. And then he spent practically her entire time in the program talking about how genre fiction is... you guessed it. Crap. So ridiculous.

[(Anonymous)]

In my university, the beginner workshops were like that (genre fiction is a big no-no) but the advanced workshops generally accept it. My advanced workshop professor said that it only makes sense to write about what interests you because if you don't, what you write isn't informed by your passion (which doesn't entirely follow because writing off literary fiction just because it doesn't have spaceships/elves/mystery is the same as writing off genre fiction because it has robots/dwarves/serial killers).

On one hand, I think it makes perfect sense to outlaw genre fiction in beginning workshops because you're focusing on the basics but it's frustrating to hear a professor make jabs at a genre you love one minute and then ask who's seen and loved Avatar the next.

[tabaqui]

On one hand, I think it makes perfect sense to outlaw genre fiction in beginning workshops because you're focusing on the basics....

But why? Genre fiction includes - or should include - the 'basics', too.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, goodness, THANK YOU. So I find genre fiction generally more interesting than literary fiction, sue me.

[(Anonymous)]

Do screenwriting professors really still scoff at TV? Have they not looked at cable television in the last, what, fifteen years?

I mean, I think all genre snobbiness sucks (your teacher was super wrong, OP!), but it is patiently ridiculous to look down on TV these days. I know people still do it, but they are just plain incorrect.

-- Baffled film major whose program was pretty TV positive, but maybe that's because we had a lot of successful alums in TV